The diehards who survey the sky from a backyard shed

IN A garden shed in Arcen, the Netherlands, amateur astronomer Harrie Rutten awaits the moment when an asteroid is due to pass in front of a star. At the appointed time, the star disappears, reappears… then winks out again. It turns out the asteroid was part of a binary pair.

“By doing this observation himself, focusing on one point in the sky, he proved the hypothesis of a Brazilian astronomer,” says Nick van Tiem, who spent a year photographing amateur stargazers in haunts ranging from garden sheds to swamps to snowy fields. In a new book, The Star Disappeared, he tries to show why five of them go to the lengths they do.

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In some ways, the amateurs are more in touch with their subject than the pros. Over the past century or so, professional astronomy has moved from the observatory into the computer lab. Observations are made and processed by machines, and many of the most prolific telescopes are in orbit, with no eyepiece that a human can look through.

But the amateurs have stuck it out, converting their sheds into observatories equipped with red lights to preserve night vision (pictured at top). And they still make valuable contributions to science. They help track potentially dangerous space rocks (NASA uses their data to move its satellites to safety), discover new asteroids and comets, track the varying brightness of supernovae, and are often among the first to notice when something odd happens – like the star disappearing twice.

But van Tiem thinks that’s changing. As technology advances, amateurs are less and less necessary. The community is also ageing, and fewer observers now have the skills or patience to take useful data. His photos are partly a way to preserve this moment as the group fades, and also to encourage it to keep going.

Van Tiem’s book includes 26 pages of infographics and charts – a how-to guide for stargazers of the future. “People are still watching the sky, are buying telescopes, are interested,” he says. “That will stay.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “The backyard stargazer”